One might confuse elements with a more widely known concept of “components”. We will introduce components in the next section. Elements are what components are “made of”, and we encourage you to read this section before jumping ahead.

Rendering an Element into the DOM

Let’s say there is a <div> somewhere in your HTML file:

<divid="root"></div>

We call this a “root” DOM node because everything inside it will be managed by React DOM.

Applications built with just React usually have a single root DOM node. If you are integrating React into an existing app, you may have as many isolated root DOM nodes as you like.

To render a React element into a root DOM node, pass both to ReactDOM.render():